Report: Obama considered bin Laden trial

10/3/12 9:56 AM EDT

In a new Vanity Fair piece, President Obama tells reporter Mark Bowden that he considered trying Osama bin Laden in civilian court if he were captured alive:

Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This time, the president tells Bowden, he was prepared to bring bin Laden back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

President Obama tells Bowden that he was aware of the possibility that “The Pacer”—as the team called the figure captured on surveillance video regularly walking around the Abbottabad compound’s vegetable garden—“was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, the possibility that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family.” He also understood that The Pacer might be exactly who they thought he was. Obama had never bought the line that bin Laden “was living an ascetic life somewhere, in some mountain somewhere.”

President Obama ran for office in 2008, committed to bringing terrorism suspects to trial in civilian courts. But the attempt to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court failed, and in 2011 the administration reversed itself under pressure and announced he would face a military tribunal.

Bin Laden, of course, was shot dead by SEAL Team Six rendering the issue moot — but taking bin Laden alive would have resurrected the debate over civilian trials for terrorism suspects.